Both tags include an on-board temperature sensor, an interface to an external sensor, and can operate in passive (battery-less) or battery-assisted passive (BAP) mode. In the former case, the tag will collect temperature or other sensor information and transmit it and its ID number when activated by a reader, which time-stamps the data. In BAP mode, the tags can periodically take reads without use of a reader, time-stamp those events, and store some 700-800 collections until they are read.

The physical architecture of the ams tag is shown in the graphic below.

New ams AG Tags Include Built-In Sensors

American Apparel Augments RFID System Months after Initial Roll-Out Complete

One of the earliest US retail RFID pioneers is making important changes to its RFID technology.
The specialty apparel chain American Apparel started its RFID program several years ago, and benefitted from the fact that it is vertically integrated (it sells only its own branded and manufactured goods), reducing dramatically issues around getting outside suppliers on board with a source tagging program. Much of its garment production is actually still done in the Los Angeles area.

After a multi-year rollout across its several hundred US stores that was completed at the end of 2012, an RFID technology supplier has said American Apparel is now adding to its RFID technology portfolio.

The existing solution consists of fixed readers at the store room entry, the outside door, and at point of sale, augmented with handheld readers for taking inventory on the floor.

Now, a press release from tag and reader manufacturer Impinj says technology that it and a little known vendor called Senitron provides has been running in two American Apparel stores since Spring, and that the chain will now also roll out this new system across all of its US stores.

Senitron offers a fixed reader RFID system that provide real-time location data throughout a store. While the concept of a real-time location system (RTLS) has been popular in some distribution and asset management applications, it has not really been a retail type of notion - seeing where every item is all the time. Rather, the retail store systems are updated when inventory moves from say the back room to the floor, or when store personnel use handheld readers to do cycle counts, or a sale os made. Otherwise, the inventory counts and locations stay static, even though an item may have been moved.

The Senitron system instead will identify in real-time the specific zone within the store where each item is located. Because it does so using a series of fixed readers, the need to do manual cycle counts is unnecessary, which is ironic because the use of handhelds and RFID has been touted and sold mostly on the basis of reducing the time it takes to perform a cycle count from many minutes using bar code scanning to just seconds, and with much higher accuracy rates.

American Apparel stores are in the 3000-10,000 square foot range. The tracking zones can be as small as 4 feet by 4 feet.

The system does uses Impinj readers, maybe 6 to 12 depending on the size of the American Apparel stores. But those readers are augmented with Senitron antennas, as many as 150 or so for larger American Apparel stores.

Obviously, larger stores in other chains would would been more equipment.

The system's software can not only identify when a given item has been put in a new zone (such as the wrong rack), it can also trigger replenishment from the backroom if say a given SKU (style-color-size) is not present on the selling floor, in addition to providing other capabilities.

SCDigest's view: While the new system sounds very cool, we have to wonder how American Apparel is driving an ROI, as the incremental benefits on top of the system it has would appear modest. But use of RTLS in retail would take the RFID model in-store to a new level.

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